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How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

nytimes.com

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Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#191

Post by kurisufag »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #173
anonymousiam wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one what? What is the secret sauce that will distinguish one LLM from another? Is it patentable? What's going to prevent all of the free LLMs from winning the prize? An AI crash seems inevitable.

The goal isn't to be the best LLM, the goal is to be the first self-improving LLM. On paper, whoever gets there first, along with the needed compute to hand over to the AI, wins the race.

The moment properly self-improving AI (that doesn't run into some logistic upper bound of performance) is released, the economy breaks.

The AI, having theoretically the capacity to do anything better than everyone else, will not need support (in resources or otherwise) from any other business except perhaps once to kickstart its exponential growth. If it's guarded, every other company becomes instantly worthless on the long term, and if not anyone with a bootstrap-level of compute will be able to also, do anything ever on a long enough time frame.

It's not a race for ROI, it's to have your name go in the book as one of the guys that first obsoleted the relationship between effort, willpower, intelligence, etc. and the ability to bring arbitrary change to the world.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#192

Post by j16sdiz »

anonymousiam wrote: post #153
randomNumber7 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The winner takes it all, so it is reasonable to bet big to be the one.

The one what? What is the secret sauce that will distinguish one LLM from another? Is it patentable? What's going to prevent all of the free LLMs from winning the prize? An AI crash seems inevitable.

You need the infrastructure, not just the model.

The model can be free, but the infrastructure (data center) ain't.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#193

Post by lokar »

guywithahat wrote: post #140
nova22033 wrote: post #117

Related https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/29/microsoft_earnings_q1... Microsoft seemingly just revealed that OpenAI lost $11.5B last quarter

It's incredible how Tesla used to lose a few hundred million a year and analysis shows would freak out claiming they'd never be profitable. Now Rivian can lose 5 billion a year and I don't hear anything about it, and OpenAI can lose 11 billion in a quarter and Microsoft still backs them. I do think this is going to be a deeply profitable industry, but this feels a little like the WeWork CEO flying couches to offices…

Very few industries are “deeply profitable” absent the illegal abuse of monopoly power

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#194

Post by skeeter2020 »

schnitzelstoat wrote: post #164
anonymousiam wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one what? What is the secret sauce that will distinguish one LLM from another? Is it patentable? What's going to prevent all of the free LLMs from winning the prize? An AI crash seems inevitable.

It could end up like Search did, at first you had Lycos, AskJeeves, Altavista etc. and then Google became absolutely dominant. They want to be the Google in this scenario.

Then they're doing it backwards. Google first built a far superior product, then pursued all the tricks to maintain their monopoly. OpenAI at best has the illusion of a superior product, and even that is a stretch.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#195

Post by dizzydes »

gtirloni wrote: post #22
rw3 wrote: post #6

Hank green did a vlog on this a few weeks ago and it’s a great explainer.

This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0oQ0v0W10 This comment is pretty depressing but it seems to be the path we're headed to: > It's bad enough that people think fake videos are real, but they also now think real videos are fake. My channel is all wildlife that I filmed myself in my own yard, and I've had people leaving comments that it's AI, because the lighting is too pretty or the bird is too cute. The real…

I feel bad for the guy but I think this confusion will be extraordinary and get people off the internet.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#196

Post by embedding-shape »

jimbokun wrote: post #130
embedding-shape wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you grab a bunch of world-class chip designers in the same scenario but don't have world-class fabs for them to use, they're not going to be able to ship competitive designs. But why such an unfair comparison? Instead of comparing "skilled people with hardware VS skilled people without hardware", why not compare it to "a bunch of world-class ML folks" without any computers to do the work, how could they produce…

Much easier and cheaper to source computers than a fab.

Right, but to source a fab you need experience as well, nothing you can just hire a random person to do exactly.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#197

Post by philistine »

parineum wrote: post #132
gitremote wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reality lies in the middle The argument to moderation/middle ground fallacy is a fallacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation

Not really. The idea that reality lies _in_ the middle is fairly coherent. It's not, on it's face, absolutely true but there are and infinite number of options between two outcomes so the odds are overwhelmingly in the favor that the truth lies somewhere in between. Is either side totally right about every single point of contention between them? Probably not, so the answer is likely in the middle. The fallacy is a l…

You're thinking in one dimension. Truth. Add another dimension, time, and now we're talking about reality.

Ultimately, if both sides have a true argument, the real issue is which will happen first in time? Will AI change the world before the whole circular investment vehicle implode? Or after, like happened with the dotcom boom?

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#198

Post by 7thpower »

kyruzic wrote: post #136
Hilift wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the funds lost to SBF were recovered. And CPZ has a pardon. Crypto has evaporated about $2 trillion in assets since then.

The funds in USD were recovered because bitcoins value is 5x higher than it was when he got arrested.

And a set of fundamentally sound investments, including Anthropic iirc.

Re: How OpenAI uses complex and circular deals to fuel its multibillion-dollar rise

#200

Post by schnitzelstoat »

OldGreenYodaGPT wrote: post #121

[flagged]

Yeah, Reddit has a strong anti-AI sentiment.

I'm not anti-AI, I'm just sceptical that it's as powerful as the AI companies are making out. I don't think we are anywhere near AGI, like centuries away.

I also don't think AI is going to be able to do all human jobs, in the physical world we have seen relatively little progress in robotics compared to the leaps made with transformers. And in the information world, while the LLMs can assist in many tasks and make workers more efficient I don't think they can entirely replace programmers (who are the expensive workers).

So yeah, I just don't think we are going to see the kind of world-changing benefits that OpenAI etc. are promising and which their valuations appear to be based upon.

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